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"2018.06.28 duet with AG Davis - Florida - via Skype": Starting on January 1st, 2018, I began making a movie every day of me playing (M)Usic. The plan was to shoot one every day of 2018 & to string together excerpts from each of them in chronological order to make a feature-length movie to be called "365". Along the way I decided to compile monthly reports named by month & year, e.g.: "January, 2018", & to release these online a month after they were done. Hence, "January, 2018" was uploaded on March 1, 2018. I started thinking about each month more & more thematically. "May, 2018" became my piano month. "June, 2018" was my duets month. It was difficult to find 30 local people willing to play a duet with me to meet my goal of a different duet for every day in June so I contacted people in my international contacts to somehow make a duet together — using Skype or some other means. We've been playing the duets for as long as they take, spontaneously deciding when they were over, & then I've been excerpting roughly :20 to a minute to use in "June, 2018" & "365". At 1st, each movie that I made documenting each duet was thought of as little more than raw footage but, gradually, they started seeming like significant works in & of themselves. SO, after I'd edited the footage I shot with Michael Pestal via FaceTime, I decided to declare each movie to stand on its own & to break my pattern of waiting a month to post the monthly footage to post one of these daily duets every other day starting on June 16th, until mid-August when all of them would be uploaded. This 28th duet features AG Davis on voice. AG is a fairly recent collaborator. I don't know him very well but I appreciate his intensity & his apparent dedication to his personal vision. He's written at least 2 books that I know of, the 1st of which is entitled "Báthory". My review of that is here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/515255-b-thorying . He also contributed a track to the "MM 76" compilation which can be heard excerpted briefly here: https://youtu.be/HDRS5RgAYzs . He & I may be putting out a CD entitled "Split Personalities" which includes this duet + many more tracks of hopeful interest to fellow weirdos. I tend to think of AG's vocals as being somewhat like speaking in tongues, a rough speaking in tongues that evokes rather than connotes. Perhaps it's asemic speaking instead of asemic writing. Of course, there's plenty of precedent for this in sound poetry but AG, as with me, comes from a construction worker background where such practices are considerably more off the typical behavior map. I'm playing in a deliberately pop reductionist style using a template restricted group of 12 pitches that only uses the following notes: B, C, E, F, & G. Given that tonality is often irrelevant to what I do & that when I'm playing pitched instruments I tend to play chromatically it's fun for me to focus more narrowly as I've done here. On a different note, I often explain to people that I'm not a musician, that I'm a Usician, a Low Classicist, a booed usician, a Sound Thinker, etc. People often seem to agree that I'm not a musician because they hate the way I play so much & hate the way I break all sorts of unwritten laws about what makes 'good music'. In other words, they don't understand that I'm trying to make a point that I'm thinking about context & creatively exploring it. - tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE note written on August 7, 2018E.V.
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Uploaded by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE on